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The Place of Willard Van Orman Quine in Analytic Philosophy

The Place of Willard Van Orman Quine in Analytic Philosophy

Chapter:

(p.104)
5 The Place of Willard Van Orman Quine in Analytic Philosophy

Source:

Analytic Philosophy in America

Author(s):

Scott Soames

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691160726.003.0005

This chapter discusses the achievements of W. V. O. Quine and his place in analytic philosophy. It begins with Carnap’s logical empiricism, which set the context for Quine’s first major article in philosophy, “Truth by Convention” (1935). It explains both Quine’s largely effective critique of analyticity and the problems that plagued his combination of holistic verificationism with an underdetermination thesis that paired each consistent empirical theory T with alternative theories logically incompatible with, but empirically equivalent to, T. It discusses the impetus for Quine’s movement from his critique of analyticity to his later doctrines of the Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference. The chapter closes with an explication of these radical doctrines, the role played by Quine’s physicalism, and his ineluctable march to a so-called radical and self-undermining semantic eliminativism.

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PRINTED FROM PRINCETON SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Princeton University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 November 2018